gary's lists

Comments may contain spoilers.

In movies you can easily have plastic surgery on your face to completely change your identity.  These are movies with facial surgery or permanent masks used to change someone's identity.

1. Eyes Without a Face AKA Les yeux sans visage (1960)

Angelic Alida Valli's big eyes stare out of a featureless mask as her mad doctor father tries to find the right skin from dead women to graft onto her face.

2. The Skin I Live In (2011)

A doctor experiments with skin grafts on a mysterious woman with a damaged face. She ends up looking just like Elena Anaya, and the doctor becomes obsessed with her.

3. The Face of Another (1966)

Okuyama becomes a new person with his mask on and it drives him to do crazy things.

He has some good lines:

"A man without a face is free only when darkness rules the world."

"The face is the door to the soul. When the face is closed off, so too is the soul. Nobody is allowed inside.

4. Face/Off (1997)

A cop and a criminal exchange faces and lives in this ultimate face change movie. In a secret operation a surgeon temporarily transplants the face of a criminal in a coma onto an FBI agent so he can impersonate the criminal to his brother to find out the location of a bomb they planted. But the criminal accidentally wakes out of his coma. When he finds himself without a face, and find the FBI agent's face in storage, he calls his men to kidnap the surgeon and forces him to transplant the agent's face onto his face. Then he kills everybody who knew about the FBI agent's secret surgery. The two men then live each other's life. When the two finally face off the criminal is killed and a surgeon removes the FBI agent's face from the criminal and puts it back on the agent.

5. Time (2006)

Going to the plastic surgeon at the mall to get a new face is something South Korean kids do on weekends for kicks, before hitting the karaoke brothel. This film was made as a public service message about the dangers of this surgical fad: Kids, if you're having an identity crisis, it's safer just to dye your hair blue than to go under the scalpel, because even if you do, you'll just end up running around kicking the same big tree and making a scene at the coffee shop, ruining everybody's day like you always did.

6. Dark Passage (1947)

If I escaped from prison, got back-alley plastic surgery, then took off my bandages and saw that I looked like Humphrey Bogart, I'd ask for my money back. That's what happens in this movie, but since Lauren Bacall falls for the man with the Bogart face, he is definitely not complaining.

7. The Man with Bogart's Face (1980)

This guy must have watched Dark Passage and then paid Bogart's plastic surgeon to give him the same face job.

8. The Man Who Laughs (1928)

Clown Gypsies perform home plastic surgery on a young boy so they can save money on greasepaint by not having to put makeup on him for every performance. They plug a big grotesque toothy smile into his face that leaves him permanently depressed. He grows up, becomes a star, and falls in love with a blind beauty who can't see his smile and wonders why he's such a buzz kill all the time. But in the end he has the last laugh.

This was the inspiration for "The Joker," or maybe it was the Victor Hugo novel "L'Homme Qui Rit" on which this movie was based.

9. The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Lon Chaney plays Erik the Phantom who wears a mask because his face resembles the face of a rotting corpse. When he is unmasked by Christine, his prisoner of love, we get to see Lon Chaney's creepy mask that makes him look like the Phantom not wearing a mask and we wish that he would put the other mask back on.

10. Under the Skin (I) (2013)

An alien dresses up in a Scarlett Johannson booty suit and uses her irresistible face to lure sex-hungry male humans into a giant tar pit where their bodies are harvested for some never-explained reason. (Seriously? They couldn't come up with a more efficient plan for harvesting humans? If they were looking for quantity, why didn't they just go to the Midwest where they can get two to three times as much flesh per victim than from those skinny Scots?)

In a touching scene at the end, when her human flesh has been peeled away like a banana, we see the alien's face for the first time holding the still-animated ScarJo face in its hands as they look into each other’s eyes.

11. The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962)

A mad doctor kidnaps beautiful women and tears their skin off to use it to try to fix his daughter's burned up face. Sound familiar? See Eyes Without A Face.

12. Black Dragons (1942)

6 Japanese people get plastic surgery to replace 6 kidnapped American industrialists so they can sabotage their defense plants just before WW II.

13. Nora Prentiss (1947)

A man stages a flaming car crash to fake his own death so he can run away from his wife with a nightclub singer. It works for a while until a real flaming car crash burns his face. After plastic surgery he looks nothing like he used to. Then police arrest him for his own murder but he refuses to defend himself in court so he is ultimately convicted of murdering himself.

14. The Promise (1979)

Nancy's face is torn off in a car accident on her way to elope, but her fiancé’s mother pays to get her a new face but she can't see him again - and he thinks she's dead. The new face is much prettier. Get your hankies ready for some sappy romantic twists ahead.

15. The Jigsaw Man (1983)

Sir Philip Kimberley is the former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service who defected to Russia. He is an old heavyweight man who sounds exactly like Michael Caine. After the Russians perform plastic facial reconstruction surgery on him, he also looks like Michael Caine with a porn mustache. He trains at martial arts and loses weight then he's given a new identity and sent to Britain to retrieve valuable documents he stole and hid years ago. None of his old colleagues or even his daughter recognizes him, but his fingerprints give him away.

16. Stolen Face (1952)

A plastic surgeon gives a female criminal the face of a woman he loves who left him. He marries the woman with the face of his love, but she can't shake off her criminal life. All sorts of craziness ensue when the woman with the real face comes back to the surgeon.

17. G-Men Never Forget (1948)

A gang boss kidnaps the police commissioner and gets plastic surgery to resemble the commissioner so he can take his place and get away with murder.

18. Men in Black (1997)

An alien made of bugs crashes his flying saucer then tears the skin off a farmer and drives around in a pest-control van wearing a body and face that are three sizes too big.

19. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

Leatherface sort of qualifies for this list, since he wears a mask of pieces of skin sewn together, but it's not really clear if he needs the mask to hide a deformed face. In this sequel he is attracted to a female victim so he skins off her friend's face and puts it on her so she can hide from his family members who want him to kill her. She gets a new face, but it doesn't last long.

20. Phoenix (II) (2014)

After Nazis shoot the face of a concentration camp survivor, doctors give her a new face. When the bandages come off, she locates her husband, but he doesn't recognize her. He thinks his wife is dead and asks the new woman to impersonate his wife so he can collect her inheritance money. She keeps hoping he'll realize the truth as he teaches her to look and acts like her former self.

21. Foxy Brown (1974)

Foxy's ex-undercover Federal agent boyfriend gets a new plastic surgery face, name and identity to hide him from the criminals he testified against.

22. Seconds (1966)

An older man is turned into Rock Hudson through plastic surgery.

23. Dead End (1937)

Bogart plays 'Baby Face' Martin who is not recognized when he returns to his old tenement neighborhood because plastic surgery changed his face. Ten years later in Dark Passage Bogart played an escaped convict who also has plastic surgery that makes him look like Bogart.

24. The Second Face (1950)

An "ugly" talented woman can't get a good job or a date until she gets plastic surgery following an auto accident that makes her "beautiful." Then everybody wants her.

25. Another Face (1935)

Gangster Broken-nose Dawson gets a nose job that makes him unrecognizable, and then kills all the witnesses. Then he goes to Hollywood to act as a gangster in the movies.

26. A Woman's Face (1941)

In classic Hollywood movies physical disabilities and deformities equal a bad person. It's a terrible stereotype that is present in this movie. Joan Crawford grows up mean and cynical feeling ugly and unlovable after her drunken father burned himself to death and scarred up the right side of her face when she was a child. She runs a gang of blackmailers until one night when she is blackmailing the wife of a plastic surgeon, he discovers her scars, takes her away for 6 months and 12 operations, until her face is beautiful and she ultimately finds love and happiness as a good looking unscarred person.

27. A Woman's Face (1938)

In classic Hollywood movies physical disabilities and deformities equal a bad person. It's a terrible stereotype that is present in this movie. Joan Crawford grows up mean and cynical feeling ugly and unlovable after her drunken father burned himself to death and scarred up the right side of her face when she was a child. She runs a gang of blackmailers until one night when she is blackmailing the wife of a plastic surgeon, he discovers her scars, takes her away for 6 months and 12 operations, until her face is beautiful and she ultimately finds love and happiness as a good looking unscarred person.

28. The Phantom of Paris (1931)

Professional escape artist Bibi loves Cecile, but the Marquis du Touchais commits a murder then frames Bibi for it. The Marquis then marries Cecile to get her fortune. Bibi escapes from prison and a few years later after the Marquis dies of the flu, he kidnaps the corpse and convinces his doctor friend to change his face to look like the Marquis. The doctor takes him to his private hospital and six months later Gilbert returns impersonating the Marquis claiming that he was kidnapped by Bibi and escaped and watched Bibi die. He returns to Cecile to live with her pretending he is the Marquis until he clears his name and become Bibi again, albeit, still with the Marquis' face.

29. Vanilla Sky (2001)
30. Open Your Eyes (1997)

A vain handsome man's face is destroyed in a car crash. The initial plastic surgeries leave him so badly disfigured he sometimes wears a mask. In a dream that makes up most of the movie, his doctors are able to put him in a face fixing machine and give him his old face again.

31. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)

In 1891 Sherlock Holmes' nemesis Dr. Moriarty uses the experimental plastic surgery skills of a German doctor to disguise a known assassin's face look to like someone who is invited to an exclusive meeting of international leaders so he can mingle with his intended victim at a party undetected. We also see a man the doctor has experimented on to make him look like the identical twin of another man.

32. Johnny Handsome (1989)

A deformed gangster's face is rebuilt by a prison doctor.

33. Circus of Horrors (1960)

A patient of an illicit plastic surgeon with a brilliant new technique is accidentally disfigured, so he is hunted by the police. He wrecks his car and his face is cut up. His assistants give him a new face, he takes a new name and identity, then they all escape to France and take over a circus. He finds beautiful facially-scarred female criminals, gives them perfect new unscarred faces, then turns them into circus stars. When any one of his stars threatens to leave the circus, he kills her. His assistants come to hate him, but he stops them from leaving. After his face is scarred by a gorilla, he trusts his assistants to fix his face, but when his bandages are pulled off, we see that they have left him with large visible scars.

34. A Face to Die For (1996 TV Movie)

A woman with a disfigured face gets plastic surgery in prison.

35. Goodnight Mommy (2014)

A woman's plastic surgery and odd behavior makes her young sons fear she's not their mother.

36. She Demons (1958)

In a hidden underground laboratory on an uncharted tropical island an ex Nazi concentration camp doctor experiments with captive young women to fix his wife's disfigured face. He transfers the genes of one of the women to his wife and replaces them with his wife's genes mixed with genes of wild animals, which makes the woman's face horribly disfigured. But her face will return to normal in a few days and then he can use her again.

37. Shiri (1999)

The appearance of a North Korean terrorist working undercover in South Korea became known to a South Korean secret agency, so she went to Japan to get plastic surgery. She changed her appearance and name into that of her former South Korean roommate, whose illness forces her to live in a hospital out of the public eye. We only see her after the surgery. The terrorist's fiancé visits the woman in the hospital who does not know her identity was stolen.

38. Die Another Day (2002)

James Bond thought he killed North Korean Colonel Moon until Moon secretly reappears with a new identity (and race) and a new face created by clandestine gene therapy treatment and continued home treatment with a face-covering machine.

39. Predestination (I) (2014)

The face of an agent, whose job is to time travel to stop crimes before they happen, is completely destroyed in an explosion. After reconstructive surgery and a long recovery, he has a new face and a new voice, because his vocal cords were also damaged. With his new identity he is able to travel back in time and meet and manipulate his past self without him knowing who he really is.

40. The Tourist (I) (2010)

Big spoiler alert!

Elise (Angelina Jolie) has a boyfriend named Alexander who is hunted by Russian gangsters and British tax collectors but nobody knows what he looks like except her, and she hasn't seen him in two years. He leaves her a note to take a train to Venice and sit with a man on the train with his height and build so the police following her will think the man is Alexander. She picks Frank (Johnny Depp) to be the decoy. Frank and Elise spend time together in Venice and fall in love, but she never realizes that Frank is actually Alexander with a new face and a changed voice until he proves it to her by opening a safe. She asks him: "20 million dollars worth of plastic surgery and that's the face you chose?"

41. A Cure for Wellness (2016)

Volmer has found a way to live for hundreds of years, but his face looks hideous, so he grows new faces out of human skin that he attaches to his face to make himself look human.

42. Level 16 (2018)

According to their advertising, the Vestalis Clinic offers a unique approach to beauty augmentation with full-facial rejuvenation that can turn back time. They use "live units" for synthetic genome therapy that matches a client's personal DNA. In other words, they run a skin farm. They buy very young girls from poor desperate families and brainwash them with rituals and videos. They are raised in a phony boarding school where they never go into the sun, convinced that the air outside is toxic. They are drugged to make them sleep so much they develop huge bed sores. When she reaches 16 years of age, a girl is sold to a client and killed. Her face is then cut off and transplanted onto the client. We see one example of a client in Mrs. Brixil, the headmistress of the fake school, whose face is a transplant.

43. Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

Raymond Massey plays Jonathan Brewster, a criminal who had bad plastic surgery on his face to disguise his identity. His face is covered with large scars with visible stitch marks. The police description of him says he looks like Boris Karloff, who played Frankenstein.

44. War (2007)

FBI agent Crawford chases an assassin called Rogue who he thinks killed his partner John and his wife and child. He learns that Rogue has had surgery a few times over several years to change his face to disguise himself and that he has killed two of the three known plastic surgeons who have operated on him.

Spoiler Alert!

In a big twist at the end we learn that Rogue is actually John who killed the real Rogue after he killed his wife and child then ran away, had face-change surgery and assumed Rogue's identity.